BEST DIRECTOR
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN, AS A KID, YOU watch a Kurosawa film—or any Fellini confection, or Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless—from the corner of your eye, drifting in and out of the room according to whim? Whims govern kids, and even if we think we can mold their minds by sitting them down in front of the things we think they ought to watch, there’s no way to know what’s going to make an impression. What if just a few frames’ worth of tattered samurai desperation or the sight of an impishly captivating Jean Seberg hawking newspapers along the Champs Élysées should open a side door big enough for a whole sensibility to eventually rush through?
Sofia Coppola grew up mostly in California’s Napa Valley as well as wherever her father Francis Ford Coppola happened to be shooting a film. As a kid, she engaged in that kind of osmotic half-watching. “We didn’t have TV reception where we lived,” she says, “so we watched videocassettes and laser discs. And my dad was always screening movies. I don’t know if I was paying much attention. He had a screening room in San Francisco, and we would just end up watching whatever they were watching.”
Even the way Coppola tells that story—during breakfast at a café in New York City’s West Village, just days before bringing her new film, The Beguiled, to the Cannes Film Festival—reveals something about her: she seems vaguely apologetic that she didn’t pay closer attention to all that cinematic greatness at the time. But she also seems to know that the real value
